Heading into the holiday season last year, everyone said that the Kindle Fire was going to be a huge draw, and it was. Now that we’ve had some time to recover from our new year’s hangovers, it seems that interest in Amazon’s cheap Android tablet is really starting to wane. Now, why would that be?

This comes from a report published by ChangeWave. In December, four percent of those surveyed said they were “very likely” to buy a Kindle Fire, but that figure has been cut in half to two percent in January. The “somewhat likely” crowd dropped from 13% to 10% over the same period.

Of course, this could be due to two very typical phenomena. First, demand for almost anything drops after the holidays. We’re all broke from all that shopping. Second, a lot of people really did buy the Kindle Fire over the holidays, so they obviously aren’t interested anymore in buying another one. To be fair, 54% of Kindle Fire owners are “very satisfied” compared to 49% of other tablets, though iPad owners still lead the pack at 74%.

The good news for Amazon, though, is that the Fire is doing exactly what it needed to do: offer kindling to ignite more purchases through Amazon. They say that 29% of Kindle owners are expected to spend more money at Amazon than they had before, compared to 19% of non-Kindle owners.

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It’s official. The tablet wars are really going to heat up this holiday season, because Jeff Bezos has officially unveiled the Amazon Kindle Fire. This is an Android-based tablet, but it won’t look like other Android tablets. It’s also being priced at just $199, hugely undercutting competitors like the Galaxy Tab and Apple iPad.

The Kindle Fire will have a seven-inch IPS touchscreen display and a custom UI built upon an Android foundation. There’s a dual core processor, free data backup to the cloud, and the cloud-boosted Amazon Silk web browser. From what I understand, it won’t have Android Market, but Amazon will have an app store for the Kindle Fire too.

The overall look and feel appears to be quite similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook, but the killer price point plus the whole Amazon buying ecosystem (for books, movies, music, apps, and more) should give this a leg-up. Oddly, there is only one button; volume controls have to be done on screen, which might prove to be a pain to some. Even so, at $199, you’ve got to be pretty stoked. Look for shipments to start on November 15.

Announced at the same event is the bargain-hunting Amazon Kindle Touch. This e-reader is going to be ad-supported (“Special Offers edition”), which is how they’re able to sell it at $99. If you want to ditch the ads, the price jumps up to $139. It’s not as sexy as the Kindle Fire, but it might be easier on the eyes.

If you want the Kindle Touch with 3G, that’s $149 with ads or $189 without. In any case, the early hands-on reports say that the Kindle Touch is a “beautiful piece of tablet” and that the touch “works just swell” despite being an IR display. The X-Ray feature, which brings up supplementary Wikipedia info on whatever you’re reading, is an added bonus. Look for the Kindle Touch to ship November 21.

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Well, now times have changed and it seems that the new must for a baby, for a rich baby to be more precise, is something called a Vinci tablet.  That $389 in your wallet is surely burning a whole in your pocket, and it’s not like your wife is trying to justify any of her own shopping purchases.  The tablet for toddlers is now available for pre-orders and you can get your apple sauce stained hands on it really soon.

The Vinci has a mediocre 7-inch display running at a well proportioned 700 x 800 resolution, a 3 megapixel camera comes in allowing you to “capture precious moments.”  And a 1GHz Cortex A8 chip processor with 512MB of RAM allowing you to crunch heavy graphics in free apps or games you download to your Android Froyo tablet.   BTW, if you were wondering about WiFi, there is no wireless connectivity, it’s for toddlers you ninny! You can’t go and fry their brain just yet.  But it does come pre-loaded with 3D games, animated storybooks, and music videos, all in the sake of good education of course.  We’re not sure if there’s expansion memory, but we’d guess it has a microSD at the least.  Battery life is 3 hours, or opt for the extended pack with 6 hour battery life, more educational content at $479.

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Compare that to just 38% from Dell, 38% from Samsung, 31% from Motorola, 31% from HP, 24% from RIM, and 21% from Barnes and Noble. What’s crazy is that all of these other companies already have tablets out there, whereas Amazon is only rumored to be working on something. Not surprisingly, the iPad is still the tablet of choice for the general masses, but price would give Amazon a leg up.

If an Android tablet had similar features as the base model $499 iPad, 79% of people would for less than $250. The tipping point seems to be around the $300 price point, as that’s where 48% of people would choose the cheaper (Amazon) Android tab over Apple’s offering. Indeed, 48% of those who responded said that low price was the “most important” feature when buying their next tablet.

There are already some $300 tablets out there, but it’s not really until you get in the $399 range that you find suitable competitors like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. If Amazon were able to get even less horsepower but at the $299 price point, it could have a real winner. The question is whether it would cannibalize sales of the Kindle.

Disclaimer: The source of the surveyed consumers is not known and whether or not they were Amazon customers or a study conducted on behalf of Amazon is also not known.

Source: Retrovo

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For a while there, we were told that the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad were two distinctly different products, going after two distinctly different segments of the market. Then, people started reading more e-books through the iPad and they may have strayed away from the e-ink wonder of the Kindle. Now, Amazon is prepping to recapture that audience with a real tablet of its own.

This follows the recent news about Google’s initial foray into the e-book reader market with the iRiver Story HD, so I guess Amazon is starting to feel threatened on all sorts of fronts. Whatever the case, people are saying that an Amazon-branded tablet device is being geared for October. The irony is that Amazon could very well go with Android for its tablet… considering Google just stepped into its turf with the Story HD and, even before that, the rise of Google Books.

And let’s not forget about that tussle over the use of “App Store” by Amazon too. Again, ironic considering that there is a Kindle App for the iPad to boot. You’re partners and competitors, all at the same time. Somehow, I don’t anticipate the Amazon tablet to be a huge success, but if it can capture the same kind of attention as the Android-powered Nook Color, that might be good enough.

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Bezos acknowledged the popularity of reading e-books on tablet computers like the iPad, but said Amazon is dedicated to the Kindle as a reading device, and the new ad-subsidized Kindle should not get in the way of reading.

Amazon will add library-lending capability to the Kindle later this year, a service other e-book producers have long provided, giving owners access to e-books from over 11,000 libraries. Bezos doesn’t think this will put a dent on the sale of Kindle books, saying that people prefer to build their libraries with books they own, not borrow.

Bezos did not want to confirm a tablet, but according to a Digitimes report, Taiwan-based manufacturer Quanta has received orders from Amazon to produce 700,000 to 800,000 tablet units for a release later this year. One of the key suppliers for the Amazon Kindle, E-Ink Holdings, will also reportedly be contributing to the production of the Amazon tablet. The company will be providing the touch panels and its in-house fringe field switching technology for Amazon.

Additionally, Amazon may reduce the price of its popular Kindle e-book readers prior to the launch of the Amazon tablet in order to attrack consumer demand. Digitimes sources believe that the move will be aimed at the iPad 2 as Amazon could be challenging the Apple tablet with better software and content resources for both the Kindle and the Amazon tablet.

With Amazon’s app store open for business and available to be downloaded to any Android phone or tablet computer, the company is already preparing for an Amazon Android tablet. Additionally, Amazon’s Cloud Player, which lets anyone upload their music to cloud servers and play them via the web, is ahead of Apple, who hopes to release a cloud-based music service next month.

With a stronger Kindle and new tablet, Amazon could fight back against the chance of the iPad putting Kindle out of business, and encourage more customers torn between the Kindle and iPad to purchase Amazon’s tablet. We’ll be expecting an official announcement from Amazon sometime in the coming months.

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